Edmund Storms wrote:
Actually the issue is more complicated than Jed describes.
I had in mind more of an analogy than a physical description. Plus I had in mind that some of the key breakthroughs in the Manhattan Project were in chemical explosives and the timing of triggering explosions, and not just nuclear physics and the engineering of isotope separation. In other words, as a practical matter, engineering man-made nuclear reactions has always called for progress in chemical and mechanical systems.
Conventional belief is that the chemical environment has very little or no effect on whether a nuclear reaction will occur. The cold fusion process challenges this belief.
True, and that may be more what Krivit had in mind. Either way, his characterization was not off base.
The reaction is triggered when the density of the Pu is increased by any process or when extra neutrons are supplied, which is done in a bomb. The process does not involve chemistry.
Well, it involves chemistry indirectly. The chemical process triggers mechanical packing, which triggers the nuclear reaction. People have speculated that cold fusion may also involve some sort of mechanical positioning of ions, held in place by the lattice, and pushed into the lattice by electrochemical force. It has always been obvious that deuterons in a palladium lattice are farther apart than they are in heavy water, but perhaps something more subtle is involved such as two deuterons occupying the same location. You might say this would be the result of mechanical pressure induced by electrochemistry. That takes orders of magnitude less energy than the nuclear reaction that follows.
I think this is an older model and I doubt that it is this simple, but with palladium it is clear that high loading and flux are necessary.
Perhaps there is a more direct explanation, similar to what happens in a star. Mizuno's old friend Enyo thought that discharge overpotential can induce tremendous pressure in a microscopic domain, which might be enough to trigger a nuclear reaction. (See Mizuno's book, chapter 7)
- Jed
